Americans are starting to realise Donald Trump is part of the problem, not the solution

Why vote Trump?

In 2016 it seemed obvious. Donald Trump was going to put America first, scrap the unfair trade deals, bring the jobs home, stand up to America’s enemies, build the wall and “drain the swamp”. He was the ultimate insurgent, invading first the Republican Party before taking the White House on a wave of inchoate populist protests. The mission was to Make America Great Again.

Today even a personality as spectacular as Mr Trump cannot pose as the rebel. He is now President Trump, the incumbent seeking a second term. The plan was to run the Trump re-election campaign on the economy, “to keep America great”. A combination of the killing of George Floyd and a global pandemic have thrown that strategy into disarray. The Democrats have not obligingly imploded, at least so far, and the Trump campaign has suddenly woken up to the possibility that Joe Biden could trounce Mr Trump in November. That would be a humiliation far greater than any messy divorce or unplanned bankruptcy Mr Trump has previously experienced.

Hence a decent change of tactics. The approach to the coronavirus has been abruptly depoliticised as Covid-19 rips through vital swing states in the south and the west. Wearing a mask is no longer a Trumpian denial of masculinity and liberty but a simple public health precaution.

But Mr Trump has begun to increase his exploitation of America’s racial divisions. The deployment of federal agents in place of local police, sometimes arresting their fellow citizens with no justification and with their status and identity concealed, is unconstitutional. It is in fact President Trump declaring war on his own people. It is a deliberate attempt to escalate tensions and provoke more violence. It is a transparent game. It might work – though there are good reasons to hope it will not.

When Mr Biden calls Mr Trump America’s “first” racist president he has his history wrong, but his general attack stands scrutiny. Mr Trump wishes to mobilise support for the police and the votes of the “silent majority”, moderate white and possibly Hispanic voters to secure the electoral college. So he is cynically using the law and order issue as a proxy for race, and stirring hatred and further disturbances in overwhelming Democrat cities. Presumably the rest of America is supposed to look upon such events and turn to Mr Trump to restore order in the streets.

Perversely, the widespread disturbances, sometimes violent, and the Black Lives Movement are being used, manipulated and distorted by Mr Trump for his own ends. That is why he has also spoken in such inflammatory terms, ever since that notorious soundbite about “very fine people on both sides” in the Charlottesville demonstrations in 2017. He is fomenting a new cultural war, with echoes of the traumatic experiences of assassination and rioting in 1968, which were made the most of by Richard Nixon, the first candidate to invoke “the silent majority” and recruit their support.

Yet times change. Today the protesters come from a strikingly wider variety of backgrounds. Many in the silent majority will see through Mr Trump’s crude tactics, as when he used teargas to clear his way for a photo opp with a Bible. Some will surely yearn for an end to the years of harsh, divisive talk; the culture wars; the setting of Americans against Americans. They may, in other words, begin to sense that President Trump is part of the problem and certainly not the answer. Americans will ask themselves if they want four more years of this anger. It is not a great reason to vote for Mr Trump in 2020.